Five years I’d been the one on top. Not by accident — by preference, by pride, by the particular joy of watching a man come apart under my hands and knowing I put him there. I liked the harness. I liked the buckles. I liked the moment a guy realized I was going to take my time.
Theo knew all of that. He’d been on the receiving end of it for eleven months.
So when he said, “Can I ask you something,” on a Tuesday, with the laundry half folded between us, I didn’t brace for anything.
“Ask.”
He put down the shirt he was folding. Folded it again, better. Then he looked at me the way he does when he’s decided something and is about to be brave about it. “Can I fuck you?”
I said yes before he finished the sentence.
He blinked. “You didn’t—”
“Yes.”
“I had a whole thing prepared. I was going to say, like, no pressure, and we could stop whenever, and—”
“Theo.” I took the shirt out of his hands and put it on the couch. “Yes.”
Here is what nobody tells you about being the one who always tops: you build a whole architecture around it. The binder comes off and the shirt stays on. The chest stays covered, even in summer, even in bed, even when he runs his palm up my sternum and I move his hand somewhere else, gently, the way you redirect a dog.
I’d had top surgery four years ago. Double incision, grafts, the whole map. The scars had faded to something pale and flat that I could look at in the mirror without flinching, most days. But being looked at — being seen while someone else was inside me — that was a different thing. That was a door I’d kept shut so long I’d stopped noticing the handle.
Theo didn’t slam it open. That’s the thing about him. He took his time.
Saturday. He’d cleaned the apartment, which he does when he’s nervous, and lit the one candle we own, which smells like a church. The lube was on the nightstand, and a towel, and a glass of water. He’d put all of it out in advance like a man setting a table.
“You planned this,” I said.
“I’ve been planning this for three weeks.”
“You could have said.”
“I didn’t want you to have time to talk yourself out of it.”
Which was, annoyingly, exactly right.
He kissed me standing up, and then he got me onto the bed and took my shirt off, and I let him, and he didn’t make it a moment. That was the mercy of it. He just put his mouth on my chest and worked his way down, and when he got to the scars he kissed them the way you kiss a knuckle — casual, fond, no ceremony. Like they were a normal part of a normal body, which they are.
“Tell me if anything’s weird,” he said.
“Nothing’s weird.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“I will.”
He got the lube warm between his palms the way I taught him, that first month, when he was still learning. And then his fingers, and the slow, patient work of it, and me on my back with my knees up and my heart going like a idiot.
“Color?” he said.
“Green.”
“Green green or green-let’s-keep-going?”
“Green let’s keep going.”
He laughed, and then he stopped laughing, and then he was inside me.
I want to be honest about this part, because I spent five years assuming it would be bad.
It wasn’t bad. It was — quiet. Enormous and quiet. He went slow, and I could feel him holding himself back, and I put my hand on his hip and said “I’m not going to break,” and he said “I know,” and then he wasn’t holding back.
The thing I didn’t expect was how much of it was in my head. Not anxiety — the good kind. The kind where you stop narrating and just receive. He was talking, low, mostly nonsense, my name and god and you feel— and I stopped being the person who runs the scene and became the person the scene was happening to, and something in my chest that had been clenched for five years unclenched.
I came with his hand on me and his mouth against my throat and my own name in the room, said by somebody else, in a voice that sounded wrecked.
He followed. Then he lay on top of me, too heavy, exactly right, and neither of us moved for a while.
“Okay?” he said, into my shoulder.
“Yeah.”
“That’s a very small yeah.”
“It’s a big yeah. It’s just—” I put my hand on the back of his head. “It’s a big yeah.”
We showered, and he washed my chest without making it a thing, and I stood there under the water feeling like a house with the windows open.
The harness was in the drawer. I didn’t take it out.
“Again?” he said, into the steam. “Not tonight. But — again?”
“Ask me tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll say yes before you finish.”
He laughed and pressed his forehead to my shoulder blade, and the water ran over both of us, and the candle in the other room burned down to nothing.
In the morning I put my shirt on to make coffee, out of habit. Then I took it off again. Theo didn’t say anything about it. He just handed me a mug and put his cold feet on my ankles, and we stood in the kitchen in the gray light, and I let myself be looked at.
